American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  In spite of opposition to Proposition 13 from most of the political establishment (Republican as well as Democratic), the labor movement, civil rights groups, the Chamber of Commerce, and many large corporations (small businesses tended to support it), it passed by a two-to-one margin. The measure won support from liberal and conservative voters up and down the economic ladder. Among major constituencies, only African Americans and public employees cast a majority of their votes against it.

  Proposition 13 had a more conservative cast than the language used to promote it suggested. Earlier failed tax limitation efforts in California and Massachusetts had targeted the tax burden on middle- and lower-income families, proposing to shift more of the tax load to businesses and the well-off. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of the tax relief Proposition 13 provided during its first five years went not to homeowners but to landlords, farmers, and owners of commercial and industrial property.

  Proposition 13 proved contagious, sparking a round of tax-cutting efforts elsewhere. Idaho and Massachusetts voted in steep property tax cuts, in the latter case with strong backing from high-technology companies, which funded a referendum campaign. Voters in over a dozen other states passed more modest tax limitation proposals. Elsewhere, dozens of state legislatures, hoping to avoid voters taking things into their own hands, preemptively reduced income and property taxes.

  The antistate animus reflected in the tax revolt was in part fostered by the bifurcated system of social provision that had developed since World War II, with some people receiving benefits from private entities and others from the government. Homeowners resented paying taxes to support public housing and rent subsidies. Employees who received health insurance and other benefits through their jobs resented paying taxes to finance parallel state benefit systems, which in some cases provided more generous benefits. Southern white parents who put their children in private schools to avoid racial integration resented paying taxes for public schools they did not use and pushed for tax credits or government vouchers for private education, an idea many Catholics supported too. By contrast, government programs that had near-universal coverage, like Social Security and Medicare, remained largely exempt from popular antistate sentiment.

  The antitax campaigns of the late 1970s, like the New York fiscal crisis, worked to delegitimize government, or at least an expansive notion of state function. The essential argument of the fiscal regulators in New York and the antitax rebels elsewhere was that the public good would be best served by less government, not more. Both suggested that government had become riddled with inefficiencies, self-serving leaders, and entrenched interest groups. The relatively modest cutbacks in state and local services that occurred in most states after tax limitation measures (California had its huge surplus to spend down and other states raised miscellaneous fees and taxes to make up for property and income tax reductions) seemed to give lie to claims by liberal opponents of tax reductions that they would have disastrous consequences, while suggesting that antistatist outsiders like Jarvis, with common sense rather than technical expertise, knew more about how the world really worked than the established political class and credentialed policy specialists. By merging the interests of large property holders and businesses with middle-class families pressed by hard times and resentful about paying taxes to help the less well-off, the tax revolt helped lay the basis for a broader assault on the New Deal order in the years to come.

  Crime and Punishment

  At the same time that pressure grew to lessen the presence of government in everyday life through reduced taxes, regulations, and social benefits, calls grew for increased use of state power to deal with criminality. Crime had been an important political issue since the late 1960s, as the rate of violent offenses more than doubled between 1965 and 1975. Liberals sought to limit access to firearms as a way to check crime, winning a federal gun control law in 1968. But efforts at further gun legislation floundered in the face of a reaction from conservatives and gun owners, who saw gun control as an unconstitutional limit on the rights of law-abiding citizens.

  More incarceration, rather than gun control, emerged as the main approach to crime control. Conservatives rejected the widespread liberal analysis that stressed social circumstances in explaining criminality and spurned therapeutic approaches to dealing with lawbreakers. Instead, they promoted incarceration as a means of punishment, retribution, and prevention, getting dangerous people off the streets and keeping them off. So did the victims’ rights movement—another manifestation of the rights revolution—which pressed for longer prison sentences and harsher prison conditions. Liberal criminologists and public officials inadvertently bolstered the movement when they began to doubt the curative assumption behind the common practice of indeterminate sentencing. State legislatures took up their call for fixed sentencing, but in a political climate in which the population at large, fearful and angry, saw in the application of state power an emotional outlet and a path toward greater personal security, they ended up extending sentencing norms rather than reducing them.

  The combination of more crime, more arrests, and longer sentences swelled the prison population. After a half century during which the incarceration rate had fluctuated only moderately, in the mid-1970s it began to rise steeply. It kept rising until the end of the century and beyond, even after crime rates dropped. Mass imprisonment became a distinguishing feature of the United States, as its incarceration rate came to far exceed that in other industrial nations (including the Soviet Union). The bulk of the increase in the prison population consisted of nonviolent offenders. Many were there for violating stiffened drug laws. Black men made up a disproportionate share of the newly incarcerated, in part because they were more likely to be arrested for drug violations than white men (though the two groups had roughly the same rate of drug use) and when convicted were typically given much longer sentences than whites.

  The United States became an outlier in its use of capital punishment as well. Executions became much less common during the two decades after World War II, especially outside the South. Then, as a result of a series of Supreme Court decisions that deemed unconstitutional various procedures used in capital cases, no criminals were put to death between 1967 and 1977. For a while it looked like the death penalty might disappear. But once the Supreme Court made it clear that under some circumstances capital punishment would be constitutional, thirty-five states passed new death penalty laws. Proponents and critics of capital punishment heatedly debated its value as a deterrent to crime, but support for the death penalty did not rest strictly or even mainly on instrumental grounds. For many of its supporters, it served as an expressive act, a symbolic counterweight to a perceived breakdown of moral standards and respect for authority.

  Capital punishment resumed with the 1977 Utah firing squad execution of murderer Gary Gilmore. That same year, an execution in France became the last use of capital punishment in Western Europe. As abolition became the norm in noncommunist industrial countries (with Japan the other exception), in the United States the annual number of executions grew through the end of the twentieth century. As in the case of incarceration, at a moment of political transition, economic travail, and cultural uncertainty, the United States embarked on a road very different from other industrial nations.

  Sex and Sexuality

  Some of the most wrenching political debates of the 1970s revolved around gender roles and sexuality. As the revolution in the status of women swept forward and sexual mores continued to change, adjusting the law to new attitudes and norms proved extraordinarily contentious. Many religious leaders and political conservatives began the decade seeking to counter changes in sexual behavior and gender norms by encouraging their followers to maintain families structured around a stay-at-home mother and shun permissive cultural standards. Their pleas proved puny weapons in the face of wage stagnation and inflation that made it increasingly difficult for one-wage-earner families to sur
vive and a commercial mass culture perfectly happy to profit by endorsing greater sexual freedom and the achievement of satisfaction through consumption. Frustrated, activists averse to state power in other realms began looking to government to regulate sexuality, reproduction, and the family.

  The fate of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) demonstrated how divided the country had become over women’s rights and sexuality and how quickly political dynamics changed. After a substantial majority of the states endorsed the ERA, in 1974 the push for ratification stalled. Phyllis Schlafly, a longtime conservative leader, spearheaded opposition to the amendment. At first she was a lonely voice against what was widely seen as inevitable ratification, but established conservative groups and new grassroots anti-ERA organizations (many all-female) joined the effort. Conservative religious denominations, notably the Mormons and Baptists, joined in too.

  The claim by opponents of the ERA that it might lead to drafting women into the military, abortion on demand, unisex bathrooms, homosexual marriages, and other unwanted social changes resonated with many women and men disturbed by the rapid transformation of gender roles. Over the course of the 1970s, the number of divorces per capita continued to rise. By the mid-1970s, families consisting of a stay-at-home mother living with a working husband and children constituted less than a quarter of families. ERA opponents feared that the amendment would legitimize the changes in family structure and gender relations that had occurred and further undermine social and moral structures built around the notion of different roles for men and women. Schlafly framed her opposition to the ERA as a defense of women’s existing legal protections. She claimed that if the amendment won ratification, it would relieve husbands of the obligation to support their families or to pay alimony after divorce, a worrisome possibility to millions of housewives who depended on men for support and for whom taking a poorly paid job in a labor market stacked against women held little attraction.

  ERA opponents did not have to win majority public support or even majority support from the nation’s state legislators to block it. All they had to do was keep thirteen legislatures from ratifying it, which in most states meant wooing just a third of the members, since typically a two-thirds vote was required. After 1974 only a trickle of additional states ratified the ERA, leaving it three states short of the needed three-quarters when the prescribed ratification period ended in 1979. Except for Illinois, all the states that did not ratify the ERA were either in the South or Rocky Mountain states with large Mormon populations.

  Opponents of the ERA benefited from the backlash to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which broadened into a general antifeminist offensive. Catholic housewives—with support from their church—played a leading role in the “Right to Life” movement, which sought to limit and recriminalize abortion. Adopting tactics made popular by the civil rights movement, they picketed abortion clinics and engaged in civil disobedience, joined over time by evangelical Protestants, who took up the issue as well.

  The debate over abortion proved contentious and prolonged. Abortion opponents won an important victory in 1976 with congressional passage of the Hyde Amendment, which banned the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortions, restricting the ability of low-income women to terminate unwanted pregnancies. But both sides dug in for a war of position, in which electoral politics became a central front. At stake were not simply abortion laws but notions about the definition of life, women’s rights, their proper role in society, and the extent to which it should be defined by motherhood.

  Debate over gay rights similarly provoked intense emotion and sharp divisions because it concerned not only specific legal issues but also broader notions about sexuality, morality, family, and gender roles. Gay activists, adopting the rights revolution model, pressed in the 1970s for policies and statutes to end discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Their initial success led conservatives to campaign against such equal rights mandates and, more broadly, against the normalization and moral legitimation of homosexuality.

  As with the anti-ERA movement, the anti–gay rights movement gained national attention through its embrace by an effective female leader, in this case pop singer and former beauty pageant contestant Anita Bryant, who was the national spokesperson for the Florida orange juice industry. When in 1977 Dade County, Florida (which included the city of Miami), passed an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of “affectional or sexual preferences,” Bryant launched a campaign for its repeal that received national media coverage. She portrayed homosexuality as sinful and homosexuals as potential child molesters seeking to recruit children to same-sex sexuality. She called her organization “Save Our Children.”

  Bryant’s campaign came at a moment of increased public and government concern about child abuse. Expanding notions of children’s rights, liberal and feminist critiques of authoritarian and patriarchal family relations, and the more open display of sexual images of children (part of the general spread of pornography) led to demands for child protection from feminists, lawmakers, journalists, and parents. Bryant’s campaign wedded fears that changing moral norms threatened children to more traditional religious opposition to homosexuality. When voters repealed the Dade County ordinance by a more than two-to-one margin, they made opposition to gay rights a national movement and a mobilizing issue for conservatives, while sparking a new wave of political organizing by gay activists. Voters in Wichita, Kansas, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Eugene, Oregon, passed ballot initiatives repealing gay rights laws. In California, a proposition on the 1978 ballot, the Briggs amendment, supported by Bryant, called for firing gay and lesbian public school teachers and banning teachers from speaking favorably about homosexuality in the classroom. A campaign spearheaded by openly gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk led to its defeat. (Just weeks later Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone were assassinated by a homophobic former supervisor, Dan White.)

  In deploying state power to impose moral norms, conservatives took the notion that “the personal is political” much further than the women’s movement, which had originated the slogan. In the process they found a strategy for widening the narrow base for their economic program, which favored the well-off, by winning over voter groups deeply concerned with what came to be called social issues. The coalitions that emerged in the struggles against the ERA, abortion, and gay rights pointed the way toward a reconfiguration of electoral politics at the end of the 1970s, after a decade during which the political system had proved largely incapable of dealing with the most serious problems Americans experienced. Meanwhile, outside the political arena, in the private economy, a profound restructuring was beginning that would transform the country in the decades to come.

  CHAPTER 14

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  The Corporate Revolution

  During the 1970s and early 1980s, American businesses faced their greatest challenge since World War II. Recession, inflation, tight credit, and growing international competition combined to push down profits and drive up the rate of business failure to the highest level since the Great Depression. Some of the country’s best-known corporations, like Chrysler, tottered on the edge of bankruptcy. Millions of workers lost their jobs in wave after wave of layoffs. The core model of corporate America no longer seemed to work.

  Many business owners and executives linked their difficulty making profits to what they perceived as growing limits on their freedom of action. Unionized workers had displayed uncommon militancy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with strikes reaching a level unseen since the immediate post–World War II years. Governmental rules and regulations grew in number and complexity.

  Business leaders worried about what they saw as a general anti-business climate. During and after World War II, businessmen and free-enterprise ideologues had largely succeeded in restoring respect for business, which had plummeted during the Great Depression. But in the 1960s and 1970s, criticism of the corporate world, its values, and e
ven of capitalism itself became commonplace, not just on the left but in mainstream institutions, from churches to colleges to the mass media. William Simon was not alone in his sense that business and free-market values were under siege. Lewis Powell, an influential lawyer who sat on many corporate boards, wrote a memorandum in 1971—shortly before he was nominated by Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court—to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on “The Attack on the Free Enterprise System.” Businessmen, he wrote, needed “to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival—survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.” Simon and Powell greatly exaggerated the existential threat, but clearly business had lost some of its hegemony.

  Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, business launched a remarkably successful campaign to restore its standing. Many businesspeople concerned themselves solely with making money for their companies and themselves. This often entailed extensive reorganizations and fundamental changes in labor relations, production techniques, and business models. But businessmen and their allies also mobilized politically, to shape legislative and regulatory decisions and increase the influence of business on government. To achieve long-term change, a network of conservative activists, business groups, and business-oriented philanthropies worked to bolster the intellectual infrastructure promoting free-market ideology.